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Cake day: October 25th, 2024

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  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPlant Slurs
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    15 days ago

    Brambles can be valuable plants, providing shelter and food for many small animals and tasty blackberries for people. But, if they become noxious, they can spread quickly and choke out all other plants. They spread by rooting from the plant tips and even if you dig up the root system, any little piece of root can and will re-root and grow a new plant.

    Either move the shed to get at it - all of it - or you honestly may need to resort to herbicide to kill it. It sounds like you have fought them mechanically and are losing the war. I would recommend consulting your local garden center for the best herbicide to apply to kill them.



  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwe are creators
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    16 days ago

    My Great Grandfather lived that change. He went from walking, horses and buggies, steam engines, with no telephones or electricity, to sitting on a couch next to me and watching the first Apollo moon landing. He saw more insane changes to this world than we will ever probably see. But…

    It took 2 world wars and millions of dead to drive all that change in that time period of one life. War is the great driver of technological leaps. I’m not sure I feel the need to drive tech advances that fast at the cost of all those lives. Slow and steady might be a better path to travel.

    Still, within my lifetime, which much like my Great Grandfather I’m nearing the end of, there have been great changes that everyone just takes for granted. The internet has caused a great disruption in the world. You have access to nearly all the information this world has in an instant. No matter where you are. No more going to a library to look up outdated information in a card catalogue. You can talk to nearly anyone on this planet at any time. When I grew up, we had a party line we shared with 5 other families. And using that phone was expensive. You got billed for each phone call for the duration of that call. You can do business with almost every business on this planet directly. Or Amazon/Walmart/Temu yourself to death if you want. All we had as the Sears or Wards catalogue to mail order from. And then you waited a month to get your order.

    You can affordably travel to London, Paris, Tokyo, and nearly everywhere else in a matter of hours. There are re-usable space rockets now. And while the stars might still be just out of reach, there is nowhere in the solar system we can’t go if we really want to. The planets are ours for the taking as soon as we want them. Even true self driving cars are a solid possibility now.

    Those are just a few of the things I’ve seen change. And there are many more. But we seldom notice and just take them for granted.


  • Because it’s a tool I use often during the day. I might open a package with it, scrape some gasket material off of some parts, whittle a stick, de-burr a piece of metal, cut an apple or sandwich. Bunches of uses. At 5:30am this morning, I cut open a package a bacon for my breakfast with it. Why don’t you carry one?

    If I don’t have a pocket knife on me, I should probably go back home and put my pants on…


  • Oh, you want a classroom lesson. After the kill you have one of two choices. You can either cut up the animal and carry it home in pieces, making multiple trips to do so if alone. Or you can process the animal on the spot. Taking a few days to do so.

    If you are persistence hunting, you are almost always hunting in a pack. And everyone can carry something back to the camp. Remember: Not everything is going to be brought back. A moose will dress out maybe at 50% at best. And you leave what you can’t carry or don’t want behind. Modern hunters often do similar today. If I can’t get a pickup or 4 wheeler to the spot, I field dress the deer and cut it into quarters and make a couple of trips to carry the meat out. A 200lbs deer will yield about 90lbs of edible meat-- give or take. Easily carried out by one person in 2 trips.

    Or you can process the carcass on the spot. It was a common hunting technique in the North Americas to run a herd of animals like bison off a cliff to kill or cripple them. It might take a day or two to set things up, but as the hunt began and the herd was funneled to the cliff, the rest of the group, those that weren’t able to actively participate in the hunt, would follow at a distance behind the hunters. When the herd was run off the cliff, everyone would set up camp right by the kill area and simply eat and process as much as they wanted for later. Again, leaving behind what they couldn’t process or want.

    All this information is available by a simple search if you want to know more. A method I highly encourage everyone to use to gain knowledge.




  • I live where we have plenty of wolves and black bears around. Even a cougar or two now. Ain’t a one of them that like being around a human. Much like crocodiles and hippos, the crocs understand that if you mess with a baby hippo, a much large hippo WILL turn you into a nice pair of shoes, a purse, and a brief case in a heartbeat.

    Though to be honest, there are a couple of places I’ve bumped a cougar and seen tracks that when I go there alone, I do carry a pistol for self defense. Cats ain’t smart and it’s always better to have a means to be safe than sorry.




  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwtf
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    29 days ago

    I live in Minnesota USA-- The Land of 10,000 lakes. It’s actually 14,380 bodies of water 10 acres or larger. 117,000 if you add the waterbodies/ponds smaller than 10 acres. I’m sitting in my house drinking my tea and looking at the lake I live on. Minnesotans own 14,505 registered watercraft per 100,000 people-- the most in the US. And all of us spend LOT of time fishing on them. But it would be extremely illegal to use nets or traps to fish for them. (There are carve outs for Native Americans to do some limited netting).

    So historically, eating fish on a non-commercial scale has been an important thing in this region since before European settlers showed up. But it has never been the main source of meat due to the general extra work it takes. It’s still easier to stick an arrow, (even a well thrown rock), into rabbit or squirrel. And a far bigger payout in calories to shoot that arrow into a white tail deer, elk, or moose with less effort than a fish.





  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwtf
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    1 month ago

    A lion can hunt because they come with weapons biologically attached. Humans not so much. And even you could fashion a spear with little effort. Which by your definition would make you a apex predator. And it did so for millennia.

    I’m an old toolmaker that still has a small shop. I could make firearms from scratch if I wanted to. There is nothing special or complex about them. But I choose to purchase them from stores. So perhaps that demotes me from being a apex predator.


  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwtf
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    1 month ago

    Large predators have a species memory that tells them in general messing with a human scent can easily lead to a bad day for you. Because we have spent millennia hunting and killing them. So they have learned to avoid us directly.

    This does not mean that that in certain instances, such as starvation or if they feel cornered and trapped, that you can’t get hurt by them. So when I go out into the forest, and where I live we have black bears, wolves, and now permanent cougars-- and not the ones you might find in a bar on Friday nights either --the only one of those three I find a bit dicey to be around is the cougars. Bears and wolves really don’t like people and make themselves very scarce very fast once they know you are there if there is an open escape route they can take.

    Big cats, on the other hand don’t appear to be the brightest bulbs in the box. And tend to be more of an issue for humans mucking about in the wilds where the cats are found. When I do venture out into areas that I have seen sign or even worse, spotted a cat, I do tend to carry a pistol for self defense in those areas. I’ve not needed to use it and very much hope not to ever need it. But being ‘forearmed is to to be forewarned’ so to speak.



  • Bluewing@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwtf
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    1 month ago

    Smart apex hunters always conserve as much energy as they can during a hunt. Because you don’t know when your next meal might show up. And firearms do make hunting a more sure thing. Hunting game, of any kind, is high risk-- higher reward effort. Most hunters go home empty handed or with little to show for the effort. But, if you do get it right, the effort can be handsomely rewarded.

    So if you are smart enough to develop ranged weapons, you eagerly use them to hunt supper.


  • The last 4 years of my working life, I taught some math in my small rural local school. I introduced a tradition of calculating Pi from scratch by various “silly” means. All shamelessly stolen from Matt Parker of Standup Maths fame on Youtube. The students, (4th through 8th grade), were always highly entertained and may have accidentally learned some math…

    When you least expect it, Pi is there.